Alan Cooper – Design Thinking in 3 Steps

Description Of Design Thinking in 3 Steps

Understand your audience, envision a creative solution, and test your prototype

In this course, you’ll learn design thinking from the people who helped invent it. Designit is a global strategic design firm, and our designers help organizations across the globe learn and adopt a human-centered approach to innovation.

This course is taught by Alan Cooper, Sanskriti Ayyar, and Teresa Brazen, team members from Cooper Professional Education (CPE) — a team at Designit.

Through this interactive course, you’ll learn a different approach to strategic problem solving so that you can create experiences customers love. You’ll practice design thinking on a real-life project and equip yourself with a powerful set of tools to become more collaborative, innovative, and effective.

and how to create prototypes to test your new ideas before investing a lot of time and money.

We designed this class for people who’ve heard about design thinking but who don’t know exactly what it is or how it works. If you want to start learning about design thinking while working on a real project that you can add to your portfolio, this is the course for you.

This class is geared to a wide range of professionals, whether you’re a business leader wanting to better understand what the designers at your company do, or a generalist wanting to break out of solving problems in the same old way.

Music used throughout the course: Just Smile by LiQWYD | find on Instagram @liqwyd. Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.

What you’ll learn in Design Thinking in 3 Steps

• Apply the design thinking framework to solve problems more creatively
• Create prototypes to test your idea early, before making a big investment of time and money
• Understand problems from the customer’s perspective
• Guide groups to effectively brainstorm innovative ideas
• Plan and conduct effective design research, including user interviews
• Make and use a storyboard to communicate your design ideas
• Identify your design research objectives
• Make a plan to iterate your idea forward

Who this course is for:

• Individuals who have heard about design thinking but don’t know exactly what it is or how it works.
• Those who need to refresh and solidify their understanding of design thinking.
• Business leaders wanting to better understand what the designers at your company do, or how design can help your company achieve their goals

Course Content

Intro

• The importance of design thinking
• Course overview
• Introduction to your project
• Reflect: How dis you come up with your ideas
• What is Desgin Thinking?
• Learn the design thinking framework
• Case Study: Can Design Thinking Make Kids Eat Their Vegetables?
• Break down the case study

Understand | Overview

• Who are we solving the problem for?
• Understanding users
• Case study: What’a the impact of users research?
• Reflect on the value of user research

Understand | Plan your Research

• How to identify your research objectives
• Indentify your research objectives
• Decide who to interview
• Acitivity: Indentify your interview subjects
• Ask the right questions
• Acitivity: Build your list of interview questions
• Acitivity: Create your interview guide
• Create your interview guide

Understand | Conduct your Research

• How to perform interviews
• Watch and learn: Interviewing
• Perform your first interview
• Did you ace the interview?
• Perform the rest of your interviews

Understand | Indentify you Findings

• Create your proto-persona
• Case study: Discovering personas for Kurbo
• Acitivity: Create your proto-persona

Understand | Evaluate your Progress

• Apply to your life

Envision | Overview

• Intro
• What can you do with a persona

Envision | Brainstorm new ideas

• Set the tone for a great brainstorm
• Two tools for a great brainstorm
• Acitivity: Create “What if?” Prompts
• Watch and learn: brainstorming
• Ideation session: Brainstorm new wyas to improve the airline check-in experience

Envision | Choose an idea

• How to choose an idea to prototype
• Acitivity: Assess and choose an idea
• Case Study: Envisioning for Kurbo

Envision | Evaluate your Progress

• Apply to your life

Prototype | Evaluate your Progress

• Apply to your life

Prototype | Overview

• Intro
• Two kinds of prototype
• Case Study: A storyboard from Kurbo
• How to make a storyboard
• Acitivity: Make your storyboard

Prototype | Test with Users

• How to get user feedback
• Watch and learn: Testing
• Acitivity: Test your prototypes

Prototype | Evaluate your Progress

• Apply to your life

Course Wrap-up

• How did your idead evolve?
• Reflect: What was the impact pf using desgin thinking?
• How can your apply this to your work?
• You have the power to designReflect: Where will you apply desgin thinking in your life?
• Wrapping up

About Alan Cooper

Alan Cooper co-founded Cooper in 1992. He is widely known for his role in humanizing technology through his groundbreaking work in software design.

He is also the author of the books About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design (editions 1-4) and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity.

Widely recognized as the “Father of Visual Basic,” Alan also created the goal-directed design methodology and invented personas as practical interaction design tools to create high-tech products that delight users’ sensibilities.

“The future,” Alan reminds us, “is right in front of us, unobscured by anything other than our inability to recognize it.”

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